I'd say of the technically challenged there was a subset that used iTunes to buy maybe a few tracks or albums, and certainly not enough to keep them 'trapped' in the Apple ecosystem.
You're correct. I think my memory of product timelines in the early days is a bit hazy.
Even still, I'd love to see data that ripping from CD was a prevalent use case at all in the early days. I believe it was originally intended as an onboarding process / ecosystem-lock mechanism. The assumption: a lot of consumers (at the time) have CD libraries; by allowing them to easily port over to iTunes, we can port their libraries onto our ecosystem; from there, we have them. That was clearly the idea...but I'd love to learn more about how common a use case this ended up being.